The art and business of film with Bob Strauss

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Five tales of madness laced with perverse sex and bad behavior, “Burning Palms” attempts to tell us what living in L.A. is all about.
The separate chapters, each representing a different part of the city, don’t add up to anything profound. Furthermore, writer-director Christopher B. Landon either doesn’t possess the psychological insight or give himself enough time to delve deeply enough into his characters (or both) to lend the vignettes a lot of resonance. And a few of the plotlines, such as the last one about a Valley rape victim’s odd reaction to her violation, are simply just awful.
The film’s saving grace, though, is a humor so dark and demented that it makes Black Swan look like a little girls’ first dance class.
The wackiest and most wicked story involves a UCLA coed (Jamie Chung) whose boyfriend’s request for an unsanitary lovemaking act leads to outrageous, Lady Macbeth
delusions. Chung plays the grossed-out aftermath just perfectly – although I wouldn’t know what imperfect would be, since I’ve never seen anything quite this icky/loony before – and thereby explodes any charges of sexism or even ethnic stereotyping that might be leveled at the sequence.
The same can’t entirely be said for some other bits, such as the ones about a superficial gay couple’s unhappy adoption of an African daughter or a Holmby Hills brat’s persecution of the mansion’s Latina housemaid. Despite his wavering success, though, Landon deserves credit for consistently trying, at least, to flesh-out cliches with extreme and often clever exaggeration.
Or maybe Landon, whose dad Michael was a television superstar, actually knows more about the deviant nature of our town than most of the rest of us do – or would want to.

Whether or not the L.A. Opera’s overpriced staging of Wagner’s Ring Cycle is as disappointing as some say, you can get a guaranteed exhilarating, certifiably artisitc interpretation of the German source legend, Die Nibelungen, at the County Museum of Art this weekend.
Fritz Lang’s epic silent masterpiece “Siegfried” screens tonight at 7:30 and its lesser-known but in some ways even more impressive follow-up, “Kriemhild’s Revenge,” shows Saturday at the same time. Both films wed savage pagan action with high 1920s design ingenuity, and with the two of them Lang pretty much wrote the semiotic bible for all adventure movies to follow. Plus, since they were made in the pre-sound era, you won’t have to listen to a fat lady sing.
Go early and check out the last weekend of the museum’s “Renoir in the 20th Century” exhibition. That would be the late works of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, not his filmmaker son Jean, who like Lang was one of cinema’s greatest early auteurs. Tenuous connections aren’t necessary, though, to ensure it will all add up to a weekend of unparalleled aesthetic pleasure.
Call (323) 857-6010 for tickets and information.

It’s taken me awhile to figure out what all Nicole Holofcener is up to with her latest comedy about the uncomfortably comfortably off. It’s got liberal guilt jokes, exploiting capitalist guilt jokes (they’re the same folks), hate-your-grandma jokes, good reasons to hate your grandma, an extramarital affair that seems pretty improbable – regarding the attractive young woman’s motivation, anyway, but then she turns out to be deranged as well as mean.
I struggled to reckon what Holofcener – a fine observer of female insecurity in her first two (and still best) features, “Walking and Talking” and “Lovely & Amazing” – was trying to say via these and a dozen-some other painfullt comic themes in “Please Give.” At this point, though, I don’t think it’s important to try to boil it down to a portrait of this kind of New York hipocracy or that sort of contradictory materialism. Despite a few behavioral shortcuts to get to cheap laughs, “Please Give” generally takes accurate beads on the gallery of conflicting urges and needs that is the contemporary American mind.
And if that means it seems confused or gets glib in places, well, isn’t everything like that these days? Holofcener nails a number of things about how we live now – and internalize and interpret what happens to us while doing so – in “Please Give.” Simple descriptions don’t apply, and the work would be less honest if they did.

If you really love ballet, “Dancing Across Borders” is for you. A truly nuts-and-bolts documentary about the development of a great dancer from (in a way) scratch, it expresses like few other films have precisely what kind of work goes into making beautiful movement.
If you don’t love ballet, come halfway through the movie and bask in the transporting results. Some of the practice footage is, by nature, tedious, and the film, which could and should have had a great larger story to tell, doesn’t really go there.
Seems director Anne Bass, a serious patron of the arts since divorcing one of the superwealthy Texas Bass brothers, found the film’s subject, Sokvannara “Sy” Sar, on a trip to Cambodia. He was a classical Khmer dancer at the Angkor Wat temple complex, and something about his moves or cuteness or both inspired Bass to bring him home with her to New York to train with the best Western ballet folks she could talk – or pay – into it.
It would have been nice if Bass, who taped much of Sy’s development, had delved into the complexities of her own motivations; or the young man’s personal life, beyond feeling vaguely in limbo between two cultures and feeling awfully lucky; or the wonderful artistry of Asian dance, so different from our idioms but no less rich.
But overriding all of that is the indisputable fact that Bass was right. Watching Sy get up to speed in three years with ballet dancers who’ve trained for a decade is the kind of marvel that personal video recorders are most ideally suited for. And Sy’s climactic solo, while Phillip Glass plays his own piano composition live to stage right, display’s all of the human body’s exhilarating potential, and for saving that sequence alone “Dancing Across Borders” earns its position in posterity.

Made for under $20,000 and based on the lead couple’s own romantic shenanigans, “Breaking Upwards” may sound like it’s too indie for its own good. But writer-director-star Daryl Wein and his co-writer/leading lady Zoe Lister-Jones more often than not deliver charming, original and very, very authentic insights into young adult longings and New York Jewish family life.
When, after four relatively contented years together, Daryl and Zoe get bored and decide to take a few days per week off from each other, the resulting breath of fresh air becomes increasingly toxic with promiscuity, jealousy and parental interference. This all may sound like old news, but great character work and a general avoidance of behavioral cliches really make this likably scruffy, smart film fresh and involving.
It’s worth trucking down to the Sunset 5 to check it out. Especially tonight and tomorrow, when the even-more-engaging-live Wein and Lister-Jones will be in attendance.

Buy yourself a present!
The fine art publisher Rizzoli International has released a gorgeous coffee table book, “Akira Kurosawa: Master of Cinema,” in honor of the Japanese giant’s centennial. It comes appropriately appointed with a foreward by Martin Scorsese, an introduction by Japanese culture expert Donald Richie and smart, comprehensive text about the man’s life, career and each of his movies by esteemed film historian Peter Cowie.
All of which is great and illuminating and everything, but get it for the pictures. Sublime visualist that he was, Kurosawa left indelible images all over the cinematic record. Leafing through this lusciously printed book is almost a kinetic experience in itself as you go from striking, full-page shot-to-shot of “Stray Dog,” “The Hidden Fortress,” “Dersu Uzala,” “Kagemusha” and “Ran” – and that’s just the pre-contents pages.
Posters, paintings, production sketches, caligraphic script pages and behind-the-scenes snaps are also plentiful and often arresting. But the real marvel of this reportedly first-ever pictorially driven book about the director is how much their stills capture the energy , spirit and compositional richness of “Rashomon,” “Seven Samurai,” “Throne of Blood,” “Yojimbo” and so many others. It’s like having a film festival you can enter anytime in your lap.

And if you really want to spoil yourself, pick up a copy of Rizzoli’s book about that other icon of mid-century international cinema, “Federico Fellini: The Films.” Written by Tullio Kezich, who also edited “Fellini’s Book of Dreams,” the format is similar to the Kurosawa volume’s, but the page-turn effect is different. The photos here, accoompanied by a generous portion of the director’s witty crayon drawings, evoke walking – or, more accurately, floating – through a bizarre art museum, where the works grow increasingly as the films become more chronologically surreal. Gorgeous and informative in its warm, sexy and passionately engaged Italian way, this will balance out any coffee table with the stately Kurosawa book quite handsomely.

The first truly great movie of 2010 has arrived . Yes, I’ve seen “A Prophet,” but like many incredible films of recent vintage, the genuine article is a South Korean import. Bong Joon-ho’s “Mother” offers a brilliant Freudian breakdown of the maternal instinct in the guise of a gripping whodunit.
In some backwater peninsula town, Hye-ja lives with, sleeps beside and all but breathes for her barely competent, 27-year-old son, Do-joon. When he becomes the prime suspect of murdering a troubled schoolgirl, the simpleton is easily coerced into confessing to the crime – even though the drunken night in question is among many things Do-joon doesn’t clearly recall.
Let down by everyone from Do-joon’s indifferent lawyer to his only, untrustworthy friend and the one sympathetic local detective, the single mom takes it upon herself to prove her son’s innocence – by, increasingly, any means necessary. It’s a hoot to watch this nervous but nervy little matron, played by the well-loved Korean TV star Kim Hye-ja, get herself in deeper and deeper morally compromising and dangerous situations. But the humor does not dilute the impact of “Mother’s” climactic revelations, which resonate far past their initial shock value into the mind and soul.
It’s the best Hitchcock movie in decades. Superbly composed set pieces (Hye-ja hiding behind a clothes rack in a squalid squat – which she’s broken into to search for incriminating evidence – after a young couple returns to make stoned love in front of her matronly eyes is as squirmy/outrageous fun as it is visually and sonically controlled), gut-wrenching suspense, psychologically complex guilt transferals – it’s all here. But “Mother” is also distinctly a masterpiece of the booming Korean cinema, rich with new takes on the violence and betrayal-fueled anger that run riot through so many of the culture’s films.
Bong’s own offbeat take on parent-child relationships, which was worked out with goofy elan in his wackazoid whack-a-monster movie “The Host,” comes to full, chilling fruition here. Finely crafted and utterly bonkers, “Mother” is the kind of crazy you buy through every minute, and that leaves you feeling you got way more than your money’s worth.

A terrific, on-the-ground snapshot of life among Israeli Arabs and Jews, “Ajami” is as artful and persuasive as it is sad and grippingly dramatic.
Told in not always chronological chapters, the film charts a series of crimes and paybacks in the title Jaffa neighborhood and beyond. Arabs – urban, Bedouin, organized criminals, illegally working youths from the occupied territories, party animals, star-crossed lovers, Muslims and Christians – alternately reach out to help and target one another. Assorted Jewish neighbors get caught up in the baroque scheme of extortion, vengeance and forbidden romance as both victims and victimizers, while events we thought we understood get replayed from more enlightening and heart-rending angles.
Co-directors Scander Copti (an Arab) and Yaron Shani (a Jew) spent years working out their intricate but never-strained storyline with a superb cast of non-professional actors. The result feels at least as suspenseful as “The Hurt Locker,” and has an even more lived-in, realistic quality to it. The Tarantinoesque editing strategy can be playful at times, but the movie is as despairing as an Inarritu film, as its subject matter demands. Winner of multiple international film awards, “AjamI” is another worthy entry in this year’s atypically perceptive foreign language film Oscar race.

Prints of what they call “The Lost Art of Inglorious Basterds” – posters designed by a dozen-plus street/skater/various-kinds-of-thrash artists representing their interpretation of Quentin Tarantino’s lovable Nazi-slaughtering movie – were offered at a Downtown unveiling Thursday night. Proceeds from each $300 print (only six were made of each poster) will be donated to the American Red Cross for Haiti earthquake relief.
Apparently, they’ve all sold out. But you can still view the richly graphic, clever and evocative originals for a week at Upper Playground, 125 East Sixth Street. Or if you don’t feel like driving into the city, scroll through them at http://upperplayground.com/feature/story/inglourious_basterds_the_lost_art_of_the_film_217

The script isn’t much to write home about. But once the climbers hit the title wall of the Alpine monster the Swiss dubbed The Eiger, “North Face” turns into perhaps the most evocative, you-are-there-and-about-to-die mountain movie ever made.
This incredible German production – and production is the most descriptive word for it – combines on-location stunt work with marvelously convincing studio fakery to make every freezing wind blast, muscle-straining movement and potentially fatal injury palpable. You’ll feel like a survivor coming out of the theater, and will want nothing more than to get beside the nearest roaring fire as soon as you can.
Set in 1936, not long after a crack Nazi climbing team has died on the Eiger and during the run-up to the Berlin Olympics, two rock-happy lads from Bavaria (Benno Furmann and Florian Lukas) bike to Switzerland to make their own assault. Though the press tries to spin their attempt into win-one-for-the-Fatherland propaganda, the duo are mostly doing it, well, for whatever it is that drives some people to climb mountains. And they’ve got it bad.
That’s what writer-director Philipp Stolzl wants us to think, anyway. I doubt that personalities and relationships from the true story the film is based on are portrayed as
factually as the movie’s mountaineering details. But Stolzl makes it his business to portray the guys as indifferent members of the Wehrmacht, whose partial motivation to enter the international race to the Eiger summit is it’s a good excuse to quit the army. He also makes sure to contrast the brave sportsmen’s struggle and suffering against the Nazis’ and other rich European types’ lush accommodations far below, from which they watch the weather go from bad to worse up on the rock.
That and a boilerplate kinda-sorta love story don’t make for the cleverest narrative. But the whole thing as a kind of metaphor for the Fascist enterprise resonates in interesting historical ways. Humorously, the French and Italian climbing teams quit before even trying to fight the mountain (just like their countries did in World War II!). Only a couple of anxious-for-the-Anschluss Austrian Nazis give the German lads any competition, and as the situation deteriorates they find themselves uniting in common cause – or, at least, in the dimming hope of living through this horrific situation they all thought they had the power to master.
If you wondered why that “White Hell of Piz Palu” movie was so popular with the Germans in “Inglorious Basterds,” “North Face” gives you a new jack idea of how exciting and wrenching that pre-war genre could be. I just wish its insight into mountain movies’ world-conquering cultural subtext wasn’t so blunt.